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Quote by Willis R. Morgan - author of Frustrated Witness!

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Willis R. Morgan - author of Frustrated Witness!

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“Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works. What confronts you? The fact that the terrain is not favourable to your project. Understand that, even if it disillusions you, even if it makes you awake at night. Understand it. Then you're in a position to say 'Well what is.... what can change? Where are the emergent forces? Where are the cracks and the contradictions? What are the elements in popular consciousness one could mobilise for a different political program?”

“Mais si le leader a la conscience claire de sa vision et de ses ambitions stratégiques, il n’a pas encore résolu les enjeux liés au consensus, à la mobilisation, aux stratégies individuelles et individualistes. Son défi, qui aussi une nécessité, c’est d’éviter d’être Hercule aux douze travaux ; c’est de construire des portefeuilles judicieusement répartis dans le court, le moyen et le long terme, comme je disais, antérieurement : « Avoir un pied dans le passé qui n’est jamais tout à fait mort, un autre dans le présent, la tête dans l’avenir… ».”

“There are many ways of being witty and intelligent - almost as many as of not being, They are often the same. Like free electrons on the planet of the apes, with a time window on to a parallel universe. The only solution to the mechanization of man is Ie devenir-machine: becoming-machine. Warhol had seen this. He was the apotheosis of the machinic: total automatism, all trace of the human gone. The dream of the virtual era, by contrast, is to wrest the machine from machinicity, to make it intelligent and soulful, 'interactive', to turn it into an associate 'anthropoid' with the same affective and intellectual, sexual and reproductive functions - and, lastly, the same viruses and melancholia.”

“The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result either in an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or "works righteousness" or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.”

“To lovers out there … A person who loves you . Will give you everything even if they have nothing, but a person who doesn’t love you will give you only excuses even if they have everything. People will literally do anything for the ones they love and do nothing for the ones they don’t love. It is not a matter of having more or of lacking. It is the matter of the heart if they love you or not.”

“If their own duplicity deserts human beings, then the roles are reversed: it is the machine that goes gaga, that falters and becomes perverse, diabolic, ventriloquous. The duplicity merrily goes over to the other side. If subjective irony disappears - and it disappears in the play of the digital- then irony becomes objective. Or it becomes silence.”

“When sexual liberation was the order of the day, the watchword was 'Maximize sexuality, minimize reproduction' . The dream of our present cloneloving society is just the opposite: as much reproduction and as little sex as possible. At one time the body was a metaphor for the soul, then it became a metaphor for sex. Today it is no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose: the body is thus given over to the pure promiscuity of its relationship to itself - the same promiscuity that characterizes networks and integrated circuits. The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere. This is an aspect of a general tendency towards transsexuality which extends well beyond sex, affecting all disciplines as they lose their specificity and partake of a process of confusion and contagion - a viral loss of determinacy which is the prime event among all the new events that assail us. Economics becomes transeconomics, aesthetics becomes transaesthetics, sex becomes transsexuality - all converge in a transversal and universal process wherein no discourse may have a metaphorical relationship to another, because for there to be metaphor, differential fields and distinct objects must exist. But they cannot exist where contamination is possible between any discipline and any other. Total metonymy, then - viral by definition (or lack of definition). The viral analogy is not an importation from biology, for everything is affected simultaneously and under the same terms by the virulence in question, by the chain reaction we have been discussing, by haphazard and senseless proliferation and metastasis. Perhaps our melancholy stems from this, for metaphor still had its beauty; it was aesthetic, playing as it did upon difference, and upon the illusion of difference. Today, metonymy - replacing the whole as well as the components, and occasioning a general commutability of terms - has built its house upon the dis-illusion of metaphor.”